Presper Eckert, with John Mauchly , designed and built several significant computers in the 1940s-- ENIAC, EDVAC, BINAC , and UNIVAC. Eckert was born in Philadelphia, where his father was a real estate developer. He received a B.S. in 1941 and an M.S. in 1943 from the University of Pennsylvania 's Moore School of Electrical Engineering. Eckert began working with Mauchly, a faculty member, because they were both interested in electronic computer design. World War II was in progress, and the university had a United States Army contract to develop a calculating machine known as ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer). Eckert and Mauchly designed and patented ENIAC. It was much faster than earlier computers and featured electronic processing with vacuum tubes. However, it used punched cards for the program and intermediate processing results, which greatly slowed its speed. Also, each processing sequence had to be set up by hand...